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In the UK alone, 250,000 tonnes of edible food are sent to waste by the food industry, enough food for 650 million meals (FareShare.org). Not only is this abhorrent as 8.4 million people struggle to afford to eat in the UK, but a plethora of issues arising from food-waste also exist.
An almost ‘pre-issue’ caused by food-waste is the overproduction of food. Rainforests are being destroyed, habitats lost, species wiped out, all in order to grow palm oil and soya beans. Your favourite ice cream, margarine, chocolate, instant noodles, pizza, bread, and more all contain palm oil. Every time you have a bite of a burger you have contributed to the destruction of wildlife as they are often [over]fed a mainly soya-based diet. Monocropping is the predominant way of feeding large populations, such as maize farming in America, and this again destroys habitats by reducing biodiversity, degrading soil quality, and requiring large amounts of land and water to sustain the farms. We are thereby not only destroying the environment to feed our ever-increasing global population, we are doing this unnecessarily, as most of this food goes to waste.
Once the food has been thrown away, it then has to be transported to landfills. This requires large amounts of fuel to be burned, which in turn contributes to carbon emissions. Similarly, as most food is sold in plastic packaging, this again needs to find a way to end up in landfills or recycling facilities. We should all know why plastic pollution is bad, but I will list a few key issues that arise from plastic pollution:
The production of plastic uses fossil fuels, depleting the earth's natural resources and adding to carbon emissions through the extraction, production, and transportation of plastic.
Plastic can never really fully decompose. Rather, it tends to break down into microplastics, making it harder to find and recycle. In addition, microplastics find their way into your stomach through the food chain, and the average adult consumes 2000 microplastics per year through sea salt (National Geographic, 2018).
Plastic often ends up in landfills, which allows for ‘Leachate’ to form - a highly toxic soup of chemicals that degrades land, water, and wildlife.
Plastic waste also makes its way to the sea where it joins millions of other bits of plastic in gyres (large systems of circulating ocean currents), leading to huge areas where marine life cannot exist due to the pollutants from the plastics or due to animals consuming the plastic.
So far we have covered the production of food and the transportation of food-waste, but what happens when this food-waste starts to decompose? Food is decomposed by microorganisms, which release methane as a by-product. Methane lasts for decades before breaking down into CO2, which means that the planet will warm 86x more in those decades than if it was just CO2 in the atmosphere. Methane is harder to track than Carbon Dioxide and more potent, so food-waste is both an overt and covert planet-killer.
This all sounds like an insurmountable problem, and if we all continue in the way we are, it will be. There are a few easy steps, and also a few harder ones, you can take in order to help fight the food-waste problem. I’m sure that the words ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ have probably been ingrained into your brain since you were a child, but somehow most of us fail to follow this rule. The first step we should all do is reduce. Reducing our consumption will reduce our impact on the planet as well as reducing the amount of food-waste produced. Next, reuse what you can. Maybe this will take the form of saving vegetables scraps to make a tasty broth, or by using slightly stale bread to make croutons - be as creative as you like. The final step is to recycle. Nature has an uncanny ability to create circular environments, that is everything at some point will make a full rotation of the food chain. We can use our food-waste to feed livestock or to make compost to feed plants and forests. Recycled properly, food-waste can be constructive, rather than destructive to the planet.
Here come the hard steps. In May 2019, I asked my college at university to implement a food-waste reduction scheme. After being told no, I decided to protest my university. This was rather hard to do as I had very little support and it was during the build-up to exam season, the last time of the year where you want to spend your time protesting. However, it worked, and my college implemented a food-waste reduction scheme. This year, I managed to get this scheme, ‘Embrace the Waste’, to run every weekday, with hopes of getting this scheme implemented university-wide. The scheme allows non-catered students to come and eat the food that would otherwise be thrown away for a small charitable donation. This reduces food-waste, raises money for charity, and saves the environment. To find out more, check out the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/EmbraceTheWasteOfficial/
Large institutions are often perceived as immovable, stuck using rigid rulebooks that seem to make little sense to the people who attend them. This is not the case, however; if you see an institution destroying the planet, mistreating people, or generally behaving poorly - protest them! Make your voice heard! Greta Thunberg provides the perfect example of this, and these words should stay in your mind throughout your life; “You are never too small to make a difference”. The world we create today will be the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit, and we all have a duty to make that world a habitable place.
Author: Matthew Lewis Unerman
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